"that" time of year

No matter what holiday you celebrate, this can be a trying time of year - but especially for young children who have no real idea about what is going on.

Thinking back to the Halloween post, what do young children really think when they see a santa on nearly every corner? And what of the parent/friend/stranger who "plays" santa? Is that as confusing and perhaps scary as putting on a Halloween costume?

I can't know what your child thinks, but to err on the side of caution, assume it's all a very confusing set of images for a young child.

And then we have the stress factor....from Thanksgiving thru early January most people are not at their best. Even if we are not out shopping for gifts we do need food and other stuff and also off to work - and so we are in traffic, line and around fraying tempers.

I'm not sure what the solution is for you but I had and have my own for me.....and that's what all need to do - find something that works for you and your family so that the stress is not an additional factor for the young child or children...

Peace

Halloween

I was reminded the other day about young children and Halloween. They do not like the costumes. Why? Because for young children the line between fantasy and reality is not a clear line. Remember that for children, seeing IS believing, so you can start to think about what goes on in the child's mind on Halloween with all it's costumes.

Maybe it goes like this: "If I put on a mouse costume then I AM a mouse. " [Then I'm not John anymore and that's scary.]

Children get upset when parents put on eyeglasses or change hair styles. "Maybe you are NOT my parent - but some other person."

So Halloween is not a fun thing until you are old enough to know about object constancy....until then, changing visions may mean the object has really changed.

Behaving - what does it mean?

We all want our children to "behave." The eternal question is what does it mean to behave? Each family, each culture, each society has it's own "rules" for it's citizens. What I want my child to do may not be what you want your child to do so maybe it's better to talk in developmental generalities?

Behaving is means following the rules of your own society - but in order to do that, people need not only to know what the "rules" are but to have the ability to distinguish right from wrong. they also need to want to act in a correct way, and they need the ability to control themselves.

That's a lot to ask of most people, let alone young children. Here's an example of "behaving." Long ago, a friend came into her living room to find her 5-year-old carefully smearing toothpaste on a wooden tabletop. After counting to at least 20, she asked him "What are you doing?" "Mommy," the child said, "the toothpaste cleaned my teeth so good, I wanted to clean your table for you." She thanked him for helping her and proceeded to explain that just as there was a special cleaner for teeth, there was one for tables and showed him where the table cleaner was.

[Before going on I do have to add that we now know that toothpaste is a good cleaner for tables and this kid was way ahead of the curve on this : -)]

Many parents might have said " Don't do that" or punished the child in some way....But what did this child learn about "rules?" He learned there are other ways to be helpful [wood polish] , that he was a good kid for helping mommy, and that we can discuss behaviors. The child may not have been aware at the time that all this was being learned, but it was a step on the path to making decisions about himself and his behavior.

Back to school?

I took off from blogging a lot this summer and enjoyed doing things with my son who spent the summer here...

Children are back to school and back to eating those lunches you make...please make them healthy!

We are entering a new generation of obesity and now it's not just adults who are obese - it is expected that the number of children who are obese will hit 20% by the year 2010 - that's only FOUR years from now.

I heard or read somewhere that we are reaching that stage in obesity where this or the next generation of children will NOT have a longer life span than the parents...

Not only is obesity bad in and of itself, it makes all other medical problems worse....

I've been blogging about healthier children for a while now and hope the readers of this blog are among those who will not have obese children...It is something parents have control over during the child's early years...and good nutrition early on can never be a bad choice...

Please watch what your children eat and make sure they get exercise....

Sifting and shifting

How do you think about "things?" For starters , your brain probably starts an internal search for a likely category [or folder] in which there are already files similar to the "thing" you are thinking about. For example, since it's baseball season, and I'm a Red Sox fan, if you ask me a question about baseball, my mind goes to my sports folder, leafs through to the baseball section, then filters your question through what it finds there. If your question raises some new issues for the baseball file in my brain, then I work to fit the new information into the existing file - or I can start a new one. This is what I call sifting and shifting. And all of this happens without my being fully aware of the process.

How does the child do this? Children are not born with their parent's folders and files : ) they have to start their own filing systems : ). They do this first by licking, tasting, smelling and touching [there was a reason Freud called his first stage "oral." This very tactual process allows the child to start developing a folder for the object being so tastily "thought" about. As the child continues to interact with that same object, the files in that folder grow. The next time there is an interaction the child already has some information about that object and now can compare and contrast the new information to that which is there. And each interaction builds the files and folders in that child's brain.

Language

I overheard a conversation the other day. The mother of a one-year-old was saying that her daughter's language development had seemed to stall - but she was running all over the place. That happens - the two pieces of the development puzzle sometimes compete with each other. Some adults, the saying goes, can't "think and chew gum at the same time." Well - in adults we see it as funny - in kids - it's often part of the pattern of language development.

The body needs all that energy either for speaking or for running - and at this point in time - maybe the required energy amount is so great it can only be used for one aspect at a time. After the running is under control - the language will zoom ahead. It hasn't stopped developing - it is still undergoing the process - it's just that we aren't seeing it - or hearing it right now.

Can you put yourself in the place of a young child and listen to the language surrounds that child lives in? One researcher [Friedlander, 1971] gives a great description:

Careful analysis of home language interactions, well recorded on quality audio equipment, ends to breed an enhanced respect for the awesome intricacy of the language learning process in its natural habitat. As one listens to such recordings, it seems altogether inexplicable how so delicate a fabric as language can be woven from such crude, chaotically tangled, poorly organized, and seemingly random raw materials as the natural sounds that surround an infant in a bustling household...Speech articulation in adult and sibling conversation is almost uniformly poor...Speech messages and language signals are deeply embedded in background noise; sound intensity levels are often inaudibly low or assaultively high; the speech stream flows with great rapidity; two or more people are often speaking at one time; and grammatical structures are often incomplete or very distorted. In such a mess, what is the stimulus?

Think about the non-human background noise we live with – pets, appliances, TV’s, radios, traffic, airplanes, etc. Yet in every culture children do learn their own language – and sometimes more than one language - and they learn in spite of all else that is going their lives :- )

Cognitive Development

The periods of infancy, toddlerhood and early school-age are remarkable for the amount of cognitive development that takes place and even more remarkable that it comes out the way it does and works it’s way into the right form for the culture.

Children's thought processes are not like those of an adult. Thinking is related to how people see things, hear things and then sift and shift those "things" around in their head - and children do these differently than do adults.

Often adults want to say the child is "wrong" when they say, see or do something different from what adults would do. But they are not wrong - they are children! Think back to when we talked of biases.

In most families there are those hilarious anecdotes centered around the child doing what children do – interpreting the world their “correct” way. I remember a friend of mine whose four-year-old daughter said she wanted to play the piano. She asked her mother to get her a certain book of music and open it to a page where a favorite song appeared. The child sat down at the piano, hovered her fingers over the keys and waited. A short time later the child said “nothing’s happening.” After a mother- child conversation about this it turned out the child had the concept piano, book, hovering fingers make music. After all she had seen her mother sit down open the book hover her fingers over the keys and suddenly there was music.

What she did not know was that there were other steps to the concept - one of which was that the fingers had to MOVE onto the notes. She had not SEEN that part of the concept and what she did not see could not be used in her thought process. You might say but she had to have seen the fingers move - well - yes - her eyesight was perfect- but seeing and “seeing” are different phenomenon.

One time I was testing a 5-year-old and the IQ test required the child to copy a diamond shape. The child drew a perfect circle. I asked my usual “are you sure you are done?” and he said yes he was done and added “I drew the diamond ring for you.”

According to the test he failed that item - he might not have really listened to the instructions or he might have and did his own thing anyway. Children are like that.... It’s also why I don’t like IQ tests for giving a score - they are often more useful as measures of what the child’s thought processes are.. Incorrect answers [those that don’t agree with the test manual] are often of greater value to the tester than an IQ score. That’s my personal bias when I am the tester but that’s a topic for another time.

I mentioned that the above example may have related to what the child heard. Like seeing is not always “seeing,” hearing is not always “hearing.” Most of us know about the “icing” song - [“My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of the icing.”] We hear of Round John Virgin [“round yon virgin” and laugh. The child saying these things is not trying to be funny. It’s what he/she is hearing. When you hear words you try to fit them into already existing concepts - that’s the sifting and shifting part of learning. If you don’t now have a particular concept - you shift and sift into one’s you do have.

As you get older, and develop many different kinds of concepts, you tend to put the words into a more correct “location.”

All this leads to interesting ideas that get studied - especially in different cultures. If you don’t have a word for a concept, can you actually have that as a concept? If you don’t actually see [perceive] something, can you have a word for it? And can you have a concept for it? Language, concepts and perception are tied together in our brains.

We are mostly products of American culture and TV and we have a set of concepts, perceptions and language more or less typical for our culture. But that can be very different from what is thought, perceived and spoken of elsewhere - even if you and the person from a different culture seem to be looking at, talking about and thinking about the same thing.

Can you even imagine how a young child tries to figure it all out?

And does!

What kids "see"

Different points of view!


Here's my dog from my the view point of a baby who crawls on the floor and then from the adult point of view.























Here is a hanging plant from the view of a toddler who can walk under it.



And here is what an adult sees.
















The TV set from the floor or low child type seat.


And from an adult view.












Take a crawl along your floors - see what your child sees. If you have a toddler- take a walk on your knees!

Seeing IS believing!

Baby does see! Even that newborn sees. We are born able to see yet I still hear well educated adults saying that their newborn "looks as if she is looking at me but I know she can't see me."

Well the adult is incorrect. The newborn sees but has more accurate vision in a range of about 10 inches. That's just about the distance baby is from the adult face when the baby is being held or being breast fed.

As the baby ages, the vision improves and we see babies actively watching and following objects with the eyes. Remember what was said in the last posing about our "old" perceptions of children. Go look at the picture of the newborn. See how large the head is? The head of a newborn is almost it's adult size - it's BIG. The head is well developed at birth and the eyes work - but the head is still too large for the baby to control - so the eyes follow but it will take more growth for the head to follow. [That's also why we carefully hold a baby's head when we pick it up and cradle it.]

As the baby develops, perception is an important part of the cognitive process. For a young infant, if an object can not be seen - it does not exist! So seeing IS believing.

An interesting task for adults is to get ourselves down on the level of an infant and start looking around. What do you REALLY see? More about this next time - with photos.

What are children?

That may sound like an oddball question but we need to ask it. Are children just smaller versions of adults? Are children just good imitators of the "adultness" around them?

Many years ago the above two questions would get a resounding "yes" or a "strong maybe." Next time you are at a museum look at the old masters paintings of families - the children are dressed in adult-like clothing and their proportions are adult-like. Did the artist "see" this when painting or was it such a prevalent attitude that the artist intentionally "missed" the actual size of the child in order to appease the family - who was paying for the painting. Compare those children with the one above and note the head size differential.

Children being seen as something different from adults was not a viable notion until the early part of the 1900's - not that long ago. There are still persons today who think children have no ideas of their own and are molded solely by what their parents do. And there are those who still attribute adult-type thoughts and intentions to their children.

Children are different. Yes they are the same species as the adults who raise them but how they function - how they learn, think, talk follow a child's path of development - not an adult path.

Cross Cultural Studies

Another way to look at development is to study different cultures. This allows us to see the vast range of behaviors in humans. Most research that you read is based in the USA and is limited by our own cultural models.

The most usual behaviors studied are in the realm of child rearing and family living arrangements and we find variations that are far outside the normal distributions of those behaviors that we find in the United States.

Child rearing practices

Last year after the tsunami you might have noticed on TV and in the papers news about "baby 81" in Sri Lanka. If you noticed, he had a mark on his forehead, a black "mottu," put there by a nurse to ward off evil. There are many cultures that put a mark somewhere on an infant or child or put an amulet on an arm or leg. Some cultures cover the bed of the sleeping infant with black cloth to ward off evil.

[Some pediatricians in the United States would suggest that our infant talcum powder and whatever else we sprinkle on babies fit into the same category.]

Sleeping

In many cultures infants and young children sleep with their parents. In our culture this is usually taboo as we have some cultural prohibitions about where children sleep and with whom. There is recent research on this topic that does suggest that even in the United States infants should sleep near the parents and even in the same bed.

Weaning and toilet training

In the United States we tend to use a calendar or an aging system to mark when children should do things. If you asked most American parents when their children were weaning or toilet trained they will give you the child's age. Parents sometimes feel that the earlier the child is toilet trained the more "brownie points" they get. This is one of my personal biases. I have see too many cases of child abuse resulting from a child wetting a diaper when the parents thought the child should have stopped doing so.

In other cultures toilet training is just not an issue. This is especially true in warmer climates with houses with dirt floors. There is no stigma attached to when and where you go but like with puppy training the goal is to go outside the house.

Regarding weaning - in many cultures an infant is breast-fed for years. More recently there has been a move in the United States to encourage longer periods of breast-feeding.

The above issues about sleeping and breast-feeding are just a few examples of where cross-cultural findings have affected what is now suggested in the United States. But it takes decades for some ideas to take hold here when they’ve been practiced forever elsewhere.

Another cross-cultural factor is what defines a "family." In the USA we mainly have what is called a nuclear family, a set of parents and their children, all living in one house. This is a combination found mostly in Western cultures. Other cultures have a wider variety of living situations. Living with or next to relatives is quite common; calling all people in your immediate neighborhood or village “family” is found in various parts of the world. In some cultures, parents with many children may share their children with relatives who have none. None of this is “right” or “wrong” - each culture determines it’s own rules and values.

Language

All infants start life being able to make all human sounds. Even that eu French sound and the African click. Where did they go? Well - did your parents keep encouraging you to make those sounds? Do you encourage them in your children?

Toys

In some cultures children play with the adult tools such as machetes; tools that many American parent would cringe at.

Physical activity

Barring illness, children have the capacity to be very active. Yet here we label active children as having ADHD and medicate them [opps yes I have strong biases!] Look at the current crop of Olympians - Americans are no longer in the elite categories in many sports...One could ask if we are deteriorating physically or is it that we no longer allow our children to develop in that area?

Intellect

Cultures differ in their emphasis on school education. Some do everything possible to ensure that the children are well educated - from early on. Some don't - and some say they do and yet they don't.

The oops where have I been query.

I'm glad we are into 2006. The end of 2005 was too busy for me...getting ready to teach again and having a friend in town - which meant skiing and a short vacation to the Olympic Peninsula :).

But my resolution is to do my blogs regularly - starting today.

Studying Children

How do we study children? I have been known to say that there are two professions that are difficult - being a veterinarian or a pediatrician - both require working with organisms that can not always communicate clearly what feels "wrong."

Studying children sort of fits in here too but I have been a researcher - with newborns, infants and 5 year olds. The main difference is that researchers are working with populations that need not communicate what is "wrong" and we just need to find ways to measure what communication IS there.

Research comes in many forms - studying individuals or groups, short term or long term studies, and combinations of the forms.

How do we know what changes occur say from year 1 to year 2? We can study the same child for the year or we can look today at a 1-year-old and also look at a 2-year-old and measure the differences. Studying the same person over time is called longitudinal research. Studying the two different children is called cross-sectional research. Both are valid types of research.

Much of what we learned about development in the past came from longitudinal studies, mainly at universities, and which were funded for decades. Going back to the last post, can you see how the investigator can have a biased approach? Not to say they did or that the research was flawed, but when you study the same people over time you, as the investigator, are now part of that person's life and being the one studied is part of the persona of the people in the study.

Cross-sectional research is less affected by long term biases but the draw back here is that the researcher is studying two different children with all that entails. Getting two different yet "matching" groups of individuals is done statistically. Factors are matched as best they can be- such as family make-up, education levels of parents, type of neighborhoods lived in, etc.

All research has flaws and all researchers have flaws - we are all human. But the knowledge we have gained over the decades from all kinds of research and researchers has led to an understanding of child development.

Another caveat - gains in technology have led to gains in the study of humans. For example, when I was in college, child development was a relatively small field of research and there were few text books on the subject! When I was in graduate school, researchers were finding ways of studying infants; some were looking at perception and language development and very few were interested in fathers! Now infancy, fathers, prenatal, early postnatal, and language and perception are major fields of study.

Just imagine what we will know in the future.